{"id":1550,"date":"2005-10-22T18:40:31","date_gmt":"2005-10-23T01:40:31","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-30T08:00:00","slug":"","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/of.jennism.com\/?p=1550","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

For some of [the kids] it\\’s hard to be in school; it\\’s like hell. Sometimes they use that word, \\’hell\\’. And for others, it\\’s like, great, it\\’s never been better.<\/i> – Gus Van Sant on Elephant<\/a><\/i><\/p>\n

After an idle morning, I watched Elephant which was on HBO\\’s on demand comcast for the longest time. Although it seemed like a deliberate move to portray Columbine, it was a sweeping portrait, almost poetic, of how high school is like. How people are focused on their self-needs. How disconnected it is from reality. I was never that bitter about high school until I graduated and realized how little of the people I really knew. I didn\\’t feel like an Acalanes Don. I was just someone who was shuffled through the system and spit out to fulfill the school\\’s statistic of nearly 0% dropout rates and the top schools in the state.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

From time to time, when I want to prove that I have changed, I show the above picture. Here, I cropped myself out. Usually I have people try to find me. Most people cannot within the first minute. I have to point myself out, that I am standing alone. That day, they had us line up in the bleachers. I tried to look for my \\”best friend\\” (aka competitor), but she was nowhere to be found. So I tried standing next to people I sort of knew, trying to be part of the group. But they gave me a look, so I stood below them instead. The photographer was saying \\”3, 2…\\” I tried leaning to my right to be part of the group, but gave up. I simply smiled instead, a helpless smile trying to show that I really ok with being a loner. \\”1.\\” The photographer said at last and took a few more shots. <\/p>\n

Nowadays, people can\\’t believe that I was like that. \\”That\\’s so sad,\\” one of my friends said once, giving me a melancholy look.<\/p>\n

A few days ago, I received a facebook friend request from someone I did not know. I looked at her profile closer. A new CMU freshman who graduated from Acalanes last year. She also sent me a message filled with OMGs and a general excited tone. She asked me whether I had Mr. Hoffman, because he was her favorite teacher. And continued babbling about how great it was to find a fellow Don at CMU. The funny thing is that now more than 5 years later, high school doesn\\’t matter. It\\’s a fragment of the past. Forgettable and all that is left are the ties, the ability to say SNODOG!<\/p>\n

If nobody got it, snodog is the backwards spelling of go dons!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For some of [the kids] it\\’s hard to be in school; it\\’s like hell. Sometimes they use that word, \\’hell\\’. And for others, it\\’s like, great, it\\’s never been better. – Gus Van Sant on Elephant After an idle morning, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1550","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/of.jennism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1550","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/of.jennism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/of.jennism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/of.jennism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/of.jennism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1550"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/of.jennism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1550\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/of.jennism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/of.jennism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/of.jennism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}